Optum is a global organization that delivers care, aided by technology to help millions of people live healthier lives. The work you do with our team will directly improve health outcomes by connecting people with the care, pharmacy benefits, data and resources they need to feel their best. Here, you will find a culture guided by diversity and inclusion, talented peers, comprehensive benefits and career development opportunities. Come make an impact on the communities we serve as you help us advance health equity on a global scale. Join us to start Caring. Connecting. Growing together.

The Program Manager will be responsible for leading the agile transformation and for the successful execution of one or more value programs to support the delivery of strategic technology products. The Program Manager is a hybrid role that properly balances agile leadership and program management to help software development teams build and deliver solutions more efficiently.

This position requires individuals who have previously been successful Scrum Masters and/or Agile Coaches on highly distributed teams, have led Agile/Scrum adoption in the past, and have experience in software delivery as well as those who can drive and influence change and effectively communicate with all levels of the organization.

Primary Responsibilities:

• Servant Leader: Able to garner respect from team and stakeholders and be willing to get their hands dirty to get the job done

• Situational Awareness: Must be the first to notice differences and issues as they arise and elevate them to management

• Assertive: Able to ensure Agile/Scrum concepts and principles are adhered to, be a voice of reason and authority, and make tough calls

• Attitude of empowerment: Able to lead a program and multiple teams to self-organization

• Attitude of transparency: Desire to bring disclosure and transparency to both business and IT and to grow trust amongst partners

• Collaborative: Able to partner with others to achieve goals at various levels throughout the organization and lead others to do so by example

• Communicative and social: Able to communicate well with all levels of the organization from Scrum team members to executives

• Conflict resolution: Able to facilitate discussions, alternatives or different approaches

• Continual improvement: Must continually be growing one’s craft, learning new tools and techniques to manage oneself and a team

• Enthusiastic: Must be impassioned and high-energy

• Facilitative: Able to lead by example and demonstrate value-add principles to agile value streams

• Flexible: Able to shift to the role or tasks needed for each situational transformation; able to “get the job done” regardless of role definition

• Quick learner: Able to quickly gain a high level understanding of the technical and business domains of the scrum teams

• System Thinker: Must be able to analyze the entire software development environment

• Comply with the terms and conditions of the employment contract, company policies and procedures, and any and all directives (such as, but not limited to, transfer and/or re-assignment to different work locations, change in teams and/or work shifts, policies in regards to flexibility of work benefits and/or work environment, alternative work arrangements, and other decisions that may arise due to the changing business environment). The Company may adopt, vary or rescind these policies and directives in its absolute discretion and without any limitation (implied or otherwise) on its ability to do so

Required Qualifications:

• Undergraduate degree or equivalent experience

• Ability to track/share progress and manage interdependencies across teams, product capabilities, and programs, using different methodologies and at different phases of agile transformation, as well as capabilities, impacted systems and/or external vendors, remove blockers

• Ability to maintain metrics and provide visibility to stakeholders on program level plans, progress and quality

• Ability to foster a “one team” collaborative environment that tears down silos between groups

• Ability to define and facilitate Product Increments (PI)/sprint plans/alignment dependencies with the Product Manager/Product Owners and engineering teams

• Ability to ensure cadence and steady stream of capabilities via facilitation of the capability refinement sessions with the business and product/application architects

• Ability to partner with Product Owners and Technical Delivery Owners on road mapping, value prioritization, feature and user story backlog creation and sizing prior to planning events

• Ability to monthly forecasting and tracking financials based on sizings and capability delivery

• Ability to facilitate ceremonies (PMC, SoS, Retrospectives, Capability Committee) with Capability Managers, Product Owners and Scrum Masters of impacted applications to review progress and track against PI Plan, dependencies, roadblocks

• Ability to expedite the deliverables by escalation and removal of obstacles and barriers

• Ability to manage deliverable dependencies and feature interdependencies across scrum teams on complex initiatives

• Ability to support test execution management in expediting integration testing across product lines and capabilities and ensuring aligned dates, test data and environments areas are impacted; along with adoption of test automation

• Ability to prepare status and Document QBRs, MBRs, MBOs and Tier1/UCIC preparation materials

• Ability to coach agile and share best practices

• Ability to align agile maturity levels between internal and external teams

• Ability to support SOX compliance, maintaining systems of record (Aha, Rally)

• Ability to actively contribute to the company’s Agile Community through participation in CoPs and forums

At UnitedHealth Group, our mission is to help people live healthier lives and make the health system work better for everyone. We believe everyone–of every race, gender, sexuality, age, location and income–deserves the opportunity to live their healthiest life. Today, however, there are still far too many barriers to good health which are disproportionately experienced by people of color, historically marginalized groups and those with lower incomes. We are committed to mitigating our impact on the environment and enabling and delivering equitable care that addresses health disparities and improves health outcomes — an enterprise priority reflected in our mission.